Title Page
Credits
Recording
Our legs flurry as we circle each other in what
was thought to be panic, but is our rejoicing. Though
we are hard to kill, it is still possible. Built to withstand
cruelty, we do not always survive. It matters how
you describe the end of the world. In the dark,
we cluster together, count each other, kiss cheeks,
hope to curl around each other in the blood
-warming hum of a false flame. Some of us drug-addled,
cross-eyed, some of us dizzy and slow, veering off to one
side, all welcomed. It does not matter who returns—
every absence is filled by another. Our count ebbs, flows,
one blooming into three as we scramble over each other.
Whether mathematics or acrobatics, we bend against walls
of possibility, flatten to slip through its cracks, build nests
each time we need a new country. Every night, we gather
those of us dead, bless each body before we feast, feeding
the tip of a wing into another’s mouth, herd the young
ones around an immaculate head. Every body is a sister
or brother, sons and daughters of a revered mother. We
break skin together, tell stories of yesterday, then tomorrow,
for they are all the same. It is not survival if we know nothing
else—reaching toward a full night, growing fat with our kin
before we burst, it is all the same. We are built to hold one
another, rolling alongside and under, touch antennae before
we part. What has killed them will take us, so we sprawl, sing,
skitter, run and turn and run and turn, dance, even as the
pressure bears down, even as we split apart from the seams.
February Spikener (they/she) is a Black femme poet from Detroit residing in Chicago and an MFA candidate at Randolph College. She is a Poetry Fellow of the Watering Hole and two-time Best New Poets nominee with work featured or forthcoming in ‘Muzzle Magazine’, ‘Poet Lore’, and ‘Anomaly’ among others. Always writing towards the body, their poems reflect how they understand what it means to love and be loved. She believes that love is and has always been the answer and that the mastery of love is a form of survival.
I intended to write about being a god over roaches—a merciless one since I was dealing with an ungodly infestation this past winter. But, in writing about and executing the act of killing, I thought about how they kept coming, staking their claim, unfazed by loss, determined little creatures. They are built to survive. And naturally, I thought of myself, my beloveds, ALL people facing their own world-endings, and how loving and being loved is what sustains us, connects us, buoys us. I am always writing about love, and this is no different. And so this is for my people, my dead, all the dead who stare down the end of the world, and sing and kiss and touch and dance.
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